Artbeat

The title of Vickie Pierre's "If You Win Me, I'm Forever," now
in the Project Room at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, rings
an ever-so-slightly ominous note as if to say, "Be careful what you
wish for. You might get it." The installation itself is a fairly
innocuous affair, consisting mostly of nearly a dozen acrylic
paintings. The canvases are more or less interchangeable, with each
featuring a series of delicate, organic-looking... things, for
lack of a better word, painted on a pale background. These intricately
rendered objects look almost as if they might have been plucked from a
living, breathing entity, and they're simultaneously fascinating and
repellent. They also have evocative yet disturbing titles such as
The Elements Do Conspire, Tendrillic Tension, and Little
Girls Tear So Easily, Like Pink Paper. Thanks to their sameness,
however, they ultimately seem like so much filler. The installation's
centerpiece, on the other hand, is an ambitious work called
Enchanted Darlings (Snow White Queens and Ladies in Waiting),
and it's nothing if not compelling. It consists of a suite of 16
vintage Syroco-brand wall sconces, and on each ornately fashioned
sconce sits a vintage Avon perfume bottle from the 1970s, displayed
without its cap. Silky white mohair spills out of the tops of some of
the larger bottles, trailing off to connect with smaller bottles nearby
(and thus summoning up the queens and ladies in waiting of the title).
Pierre, to judge from this magical piece, is a connoisseur of found
objects, which she imbues with mystery and exoticism. If only the
remaining works in this little solo show would cast a similarly
talismanic spell.

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